For the first time in a scary number of years, The A.V. Club is heading to the Big Easy for the Overlook Film Festival, a four-day celebration of all things horror, running from April 3 to April 6. Now in its ninth year, the Overlook continues turning America’s most haunted city into a destination for film fans craving something new and terrifying. This year is no exception. Offering a healthy balance of big studio fare, low-budget slashers, and international nightmares, the festival features new movies from David Cronenberg, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Christopher Landon, and more.
We’ll be on the ground in New Orleans, sending dispatches to be read by candlelight when the moon is full on a night just like this one. In anticipation of the festival, here’s an appetizer of our most anticipated movies terrorizing Overlook.
Happy Death Day’s Christopher Landon returns to the world of high-concept horror with Drop. Finally, making wireless close-range file-sharing the nightmare it was always destined to become, the movie sees widowed mother Violet (The White Lotus‘ Meghann Fahy) dropping back into the dating scene. Unfortunately, her first date goes sideways when a series of cryptic and threatening drops leave her wishing she swiped left. Violet finds herself in a bizarre game of will-she-won’t-she as the dropper sends videos from inside her house and threatens her kid. The only way out? Kill her date.
Redux Redux
Redux Redux explores the multiverse of madness with a fatalistic brutality that not even the mighty Deadpool could muster. The movie follows Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus), a parallel-universe hopper who traverses the timelines in search of her murdered daughter, hoping to save her before she’s killed. Irene always fails, but she’s become addicted to murdering her daughter’s killer. A family affair written and directed by Michaela’s brothers, Kevin and Matthew McManus, Redux Redux takes the violence and ingenuity of Everything Everywhere All At Once and gives it a light dusting of Memento‘s cyclical dread.
The Shrouds
The A.V. Clubreviewed David Cronenberg’s latest when it premiered last May at Cannes, but now it’s finally washing up on our shores. The Shrouds follows Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a death-obsessed widower tech exec who invents a coffin camera for streaming corpse decay. GraveTech allows viewers to surveil the coffin’s interiors, but when Karsh’s wife’s grave is desecrated, he springs to life, and things start to get weird.
Good Boy
Earlier this year, Presence explored a horror movie from the ghost’s perspective. Good Boy fetches a thriller from a dog’s POV. The film follows Indy, the titular good boy, who joins his human companion, Todd (Shane Jensen), at Todd’s grandfather’s cursed cabin in the woods. The cabin is haunted; unfortunately, only Indy can sense the spirits. “Evil Dead but dog” is a risky endeavor, but if director Ben Leonberg pulls off this trick, it’s the audience who gets a treat.
Cloud
The latest from Cure and Pulse director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cloud brings the filmmaker’s ethereal and uncanny horror atmosphere to the seedy world of online resellers. Yoshii, an oblivious goods-flipper, kicks off a violently escalating chain of events as the lines between online and IRL blur. Despite the anonymity of the internet, it all ends up getting back to him. Much as Pulse more or less predicted the violent loneliness that the internet would inspire, Cloud explores how scary the internet’s fractured identities can be.
Dead Lover
Along with The Ugly Stepsister, the Canadian indie Dead Lover has become one of the buzziest horror movies of festival season, and joins about five million other Frankenstein riffs coming out this year. But this 16mm cheapie has the advantage of screaming, “It’s alive!” before the others can terrorize unsuspecting villagers around the globe. Dead Lover follows a gravedigger who finds and loses the love of her life, turning to the controversial science of Dr. Frankenstein to resurrect her beloved.
Clown In A Cornfield
The title says it all, but this new slasher from Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil director Eli Craig aims for something more campy than corny. Following the standard plot of a newcomer learning about a dying town’s local monster, Clown In A Cornfield injects the proceedings with absurdity and satire. The clown in question, Frendo, was the mascot of the town’s corn syrup factory that burned down and sent it into depression. Spoofing the American impulse to base every decision on nostalgia, Clown In A Cornfield could be a cane-sugar Coke waiting to be enjoyed.
The True Beauty Of Being Bitten By A Tick
Afraid of bugs? Time to face your fears. In The True Beauty Of Being Bitten By Tick, Zoë Chao plays Yvonne, a woman escaping to her friend’s idyllic country home in the sticks to enjoy some peace and quiet. Hoping for some R&R following a tragic accident, Yvonne gets more fresh air than she bargained for when she receives the eponymous tick bite, setting forth a grotesque series of events that seriously ruins her vacation.
